SNL Glams Up the Impeachment Hearings with Soap Opera Storylines and Jon Hamm

How did America get through the Watergate Hearings without Saturday Night Live? NBC’s unkillable comedy-adjacent program didn’t exit for a solid two years after those hearings kicked off, meaning an entire nation was deprived of weekly comedy sketches where celebrities in wigs enacted a bunch of surface-level observations about the unraveling of Nixon’s presidency. How informed those people must have been about what was actually happening in the hearings! It’s hard to imagine a day when American citizens were actually interested in the news and were able to get relatively unbiased reporting of such from a handful of nationally recognized media outlets.

Fortunately this is the 21st century, where a decades-long plan to invalidate the authority of the mainstream news media has completely undermined the entire concept of “the truth” for a vast swath of Americans. It’s hard to imagine impeachment hearings being written off as
a failure after one day because they were “boring” and lacked “pizzazz” in a world where people still cared about and believed in things. Thank god we’re all past giving a shit, huh?

Saturday Night Live focused on those depressing complaints in its latest episode’s recap of the impeachment hearings. Instead of just carting out a cameo from, say, Jon Hamm, and reeling off a bunch of jokes that conflated Ambassador Taylor with Don Draper, this week’s SNL carted out a cameo from Jon Hamm as part of a larger bit about TV networks trying to make the impeachment hearings “sexier” and more compelling for a viewing audience. Say goodbye to news coverage, and hello to Days of Our Impeachment, a soap opera-tinged recast of the impeachment hearings, set in a world where soap operas apparently still exist and have a following. Find out what the show has to say about Taylor, former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, the testy (and content-free) Jim Jordan, and more of the chief players from last week’s impeachment hearings. Watch the clip below or hit up SNL’s YouTube page for more.